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BY: SAYO AKINTOLA
Nigerians may not have seen the last of the wave of building collapse across the country, particularly, in Lagos State as the Director General DG of Standard Organization of Nigeria SON; Odumodu has warned that more buildings would collapse in the country.
‘’We should expect more building collapse if we continue to do the same thing and expect to get a different result. We must change our attitude and ensure that we maintain good quality control measures in the various building materials we use in construction works’’, he said
The SON DG made the assertion on Thursday (September 25, 2014) in an interview in Lagos where he attributed the incessant collapse of building collapse to the poor quality of cement being used for construction works across the length and breadth of Nigeria in order to cut cost and maximize profit.
He lamented the attitude of construction workers who indulge in using insufficient quantity of cement to mix with other ingredients like gravel, granite and sand with a view to making huge profit in the trade. According to him, any manufacturer that sells a unit of block at N150 is indulging in corrupt practices that are inimical to the wellbeing of Nigerians, adding that a good unit of block shouldn’t cost anything below N200.00 at the market price of a bag of cement.
He said rather than use a bag of cement to produce twenty units of quality blocks, block producers and construction workers produce forty blocks using a bag of cement, stressing that the act had compromised the quality of such buildings, thereby posing a great danger to the lives of the occupants of such buildings.
He however, said the October 1, 2014 deadline set for cement manufacturers to meet the quality control requirements for them to put manufacture date on bags of the product remained sacrosanct. He said SON would not rescind its earlier decision to enforce quality control measures and prevent Nigerians from untimely death occasioned by incessant building collapse.
Odumodu however, condemned cement manufacturers who are insinuating that the measure was aimed at giving a big local cement manufacturer a monopoly to dominate the market, stressing that ‘’we are not giving anyone an edge over the others; but to ensure that cement manufacturers do the right things to save innocent Nigerians from untimely death through avoidable building collapse.